Niall Hatch
speaker
1,514 appearances
30 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 4d ago
Niall Hatch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 10.
Appearances
That's fantastic, isn't he?
No, the thing with pigeons, wood pigeons particularly, they do have a much longer breeding season than most other Irish birds.
As you mentioned there, the feral pigeon or the street pigeon, Richard, they have a very long nesting season.
And the collared dove, another member of the pigeon family, they have no nesting season at all.
They nest all year round, provided the weather is good enough.
Obviously, if it's extremely cold and it's pouring rain, they may forego it for a few months.
But if you have a mild balmy winter, they'll nest all the way through.
So wood pigeons, as you said, Richard, they can go all the way through from February and March.
easily through to early November if the conditions are right.
And one of the reasons that pigeons and doves can do this in a way that other birds can't is they're not so dependent on one kind of food.
So if you are a blue tit, for example, you only really can feed your youngsters caterpillars.
So you time your nesting, you evolve the time you're nesting with the peak emergence of caterpillars, which tends to be sort of late April through May and maybe as late as early June, but usually finished by then.
And then that food is gone.
If you're a bird like a finch, you as an adult may mainly eat seeds, but you still have to find insect larvae to feed to your chicks.
And so your nesting season, again, it's the late spring and early summer.
If you're a pigeon, you're not feeding any of that type of stuff to your chicks at all.
What they do is they eat what they normally do.
The adult pigeons will eat all sorts of leaves and shoots and berries, anything they can find.
And rather than feed that food directly to their chicks, they produce a special milk in their crop or in their throat.
It's called crop milk.
Showing 241–260 of 1,514 · page 13 of 76
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